


Hearts and Souls

by Generex



Category: Political RPF, Political RPF - US 21st c.
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, life after death, secret history
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:08:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28184412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Generex/pseuds/Generex
Summary: Milicent goes on her very first field operation, observes a strange anticapitalist march/demonstration, and runs into an unexpected enemy.This is directly related to the other items I've posted, I swear! The other, more famous real people will show up in later chapters.





	Hearts and Souls

Milicent peered through the glass door at the sunny Manhattan street. The sunny, nearly empty, middle-of-the-afternoon-in-April Manhattan street. It was like seeing Trafalgar Square empty on an equally fine day. Unnerving. 

Nonetheless, she had a task to perform, although the absence of crowds to obscure her also made her nervous. But tradecraft sometimes fit poorly with reality; that was just a fact. She sighed, tugged at her plain black face mask, and pushed out through the door.

Her prior acclimation excursions made it easier to cope with the oddness of being out in the World again. Still, she set off down the sidewalk with the disturbing feeling that if she didn’t pay strict attention, she might accidentally float off into the air – or down into the utility tunnels. Her trainers had assured her that this wouldn’t happen by accident. Even her sharp awareness of the dreamlike quality of her presence should diminish. Supposedly. Milicent had her doubts, which she had kept to herself. 

Her navy pumps clacked on the cement, but somehow dimly. Her pale reflection in the windows of the closed shops seemed blurred. The breeze didn’t ruffle her hair as much as it should have. The ambulance sirens shrieking from various directions sounded a little muffled. She exchanged glances and nods with a few other workers who would immediately forget her, unless she purposely sought to make an impression. Which she was not trying to do at all; in fact, her navy skirt and blazer, with a plain white blouse, were deliberately bland. She could have been a worker in any office building in the city. It was amazing, she thought idly, seeing herself reflected waveringly in another window, how little professional business attire had changed since the days of the last war. 

She turned left and proceeded along Wall Street. The group she was here to watch was easy to spot even before she passed the temporary police barricade, since it was the only group in sight. There were about a dozen of them, busy lining up six feet apart. Very orderly, Milicent thought approvingly.

Her superiors had only been able to tell her that this was supposed to be a demonstration, produced by a potentially allied group. She let herself look at them – they were out here to be looked at, after all – and slowed her walk, letting her curiosity show. 

The demonstrators were split about evenly between those wearing tan or navy blue slacks and knit collared shirts (“polo” shirts, Milicent remembered they were called, how bizarre) and those wearing black or navy blue business suits. She thought a little more than half were women, though she was not as good at reading modern short haircuts as she needed to be. As she came even with them, she realized that the more brightly-colored things attached to each person were a variety of scarves, pins, jewelry, and paper emblems held on with safety pins. She saw sharks, dollar signs, the pirate skull-and-crossbones, the universal poison symbol, and even the universal radiation symbol. A handful wore fedoras sporting several such things. And all of them were young, in their twenties at most. At the back, a tall black man was carrying a drum. Milicent noted a black woman and several Asian people. The leaders at the front were a white man wearing a black three-piece suit and a tie with a large shark on it, and a white woman with black purple-streaked hair, who was using a wheelchair and carried a bundle in her lap. 

It was obviously an anti-capitalist demonstration of some kind. Milicent trailed along, now fascinated, as the group began pacing slowly forward. The drummer kept the slow cadence used for military executions and funerals – a nice touch, she thought. The leader hoisted a placard depicting a red line chart, its jagged line trending upward. They all remained silent, except for the drum, and visibly solemn. There were at least a half-dozen bored police officers standing at intervals along the march route. 

She noticed that a young woman with a shoulder-mounted camera was filming the group, mostly from ahead, and shifted her own course to avoid being filmed. The march turned out to be all of two blocks long, ending at the New York Stock Exchange. The group ignored the large bronze statue of a bull and assembled in front of the building’s entrance. 

Milicent and a handful of others watched as the leaders stepped forward in front of a small table that had been set up by the march’s support people – the green and gold piece of cloth emblazoned with large dollar signs made its connection to the march very obvious. The camera woman set up to capture the proceedings from a single vantage point. 

The man raised the placard high above his head, while the woman extracted something from her bundle. The something proved to be a bell and a small hammer, and the woman briskly struck the bell nine times. 

“Fellow consumers!” the man shouted. “In this holy place we gather to worship our Lord, the Market. All hail the Market!”

The small pretend congregation replied, “All hail the Market, master and director of our fate!” More people had already stopped to watch, and Milicent heard a few of them laugh nervously. 

Still holding up the placard, the man said, “Oh Market, we pray for your increase. We pray for your liquidity. We pray for the Line, that the Line may go up.” 

The congregation raised their arms in a V, index fingers pointed upward, and shouted, “The Line! The Line! The Line must go up!”

The leader continued, “As your holy Line goes up, oh Market, we pray to receive our dividends.”

“The Line! The Line! The Line must go up!”

“As your holy Line goes up, oh Market, we pray that your profits will shower down upon us and make us wealthy.”

“The Line! The Line! The Line must go up!” This time, the congregants jumped up in the air, trying to time the jumps with the word “line” but with varying success. It was more than a little daft, and again, some of the onlookers laughed. 

Then the ‘worshippers’ lowered their arms and the leader went on, putting an element of real passion into his voice. “Oh holy Market, to you we offer up the best years of our lives. For you and your blessed Companies, we will work at all hours, so that your Line may go up.”

More quietly, the worshippers said, “The Line!”

“Oh holy Market, for the sake of you and your blessed Companies, we will accept that we have no right to sit down at work, nor to relieve ourselves.” 

“The Line!” the ‘congregants’ repeated, a little louder. 

“Oh holy Market, for the sake of you and your blessed Companies, we will accept every rent increase as a sign of your favor toward your beloved servants, the landlords.” 

“The Line!” shouted the congregation. Milicent, now watching the small audience and the police officers, saw unease in the way they heard these lines and shifted their feet, murmured to one another, and moved as if to leave but did not. 

She also felt a new and peculiar sensation that had been described to her in her training. It was most like a buzzing sound, except it was silent, and she was not touching anything but the solid ground. As the demonstration’s leader said something about a sacrifice, and the woman produced a plastic doll from her bundle (taking the placard in exchange), a man came to stand beside Milicent. He was definitely the source of the buzzing sensation. Did he feel something similar from her? She pretended not to notice him, watching the two leaders set up their mock ritual. 

“Hasn’t anyone told them that satire is dead?” the man said in a warm, amused tone. 

Now Milicent glanced up and recognized him from her briefings, though she tried not show it. He didn’t look pale enough to be called “Chalky,” but he did look white. His dark eyes watched the demonstration, not her. He was not wearing a mask, so she could see his strong nose and rounded chin. She looked away from him. “As long as truth lives, so does satire,” she said.

He chuckled, and she was sure he looked at her. “There you go, then. Dying, if not already dead.” 

Talk of death, and worse, the death of truth, disturbed Milicent. So did Chalky; he was very, very old, according to their records. She concentrated on the performance in front of them. The leader had put the doll onto the table and now held a cartoonish plastic knife above it. The wind had picked up, snapping at the altar cloth, and he wisely held the doll down with one hand. “Oh holy Market,” he shouted, “we have toiled in your workplaces and purchased your goods and still, we acknowledge that our efforts have not been enough. We pray that you accept this sacrifice as a sign of our commitment to your principles:

“There is no cause except profit!”

The ‘congregation’ echoed this line back, loudly enough to make further conversation difficult, in a series of calls and responses. “There is no truth except in profit! There is no joy except in profit!” 

Then the ‘celebrant’ ponderously brought the knife down onto the doll and apparently broke some packet of red goo, which spattered over the doll’s torso. 

The pretend congregation raised their arms and jumped, shouting, “Profit! Profit!” and “The Liiiiine!” Milicent guessed, from the onlookers’ expressions, that this bit was over the top. She thought it was a bit much, herself. 

Then the group fell silent as the leader crossed his arms over his chest and proclaimed, “Fellow consumers, know that this and all our sacrifices are not in vain. As the Line goes up, and the holy Market prospers, so shall we prosper. Keep profit in your heart and at the center of your actions, and it must be so.”

“It must be so! The Line! The Line! The Line!” came the response. 

The woman in the wheelchair picked up the bell and struck it again, nine times. The weirdness was over. The drummer started up his cadence, several young people started picking up the makeshift altar, and others moved around the edge of the small crowd, offering pamphlets at arm’s length. Milicent took one from a girl whose eyes glittered bright with some emotion – excitement? Anger? Masks made it so hard to read expressions. Chalky also took one, and they both stood reading about the fight against market idolatry and the need to recenter human needs and well-being in the world. 

“Interesting,” Chalky said, “that they avoid using any names. It’s almost as if they know something.” 

“It says ‘No one faith is responsible. All creeds have been infected by the cult of profit,’” Milicent pointed out. 

“And anti-Semitism is so easy and useful,” Chalky sighed in a show of regret. “What a pity.” 

Milicent, on guard, did not respond. She thought that whoever made the pamphlet had had training in graphic design, or was following a pretty good template. And there was a website listed, the same skimpy one she had looked at before, which had brought her out here in the first place. 

“‘Shake off the chains of market idolatry,’” Chalky read, amused. “‘You have nothing to lose but your servile dependence on the NYSE.’ I can’t tell if that’s a reference to Marx or not.” 

Milicent tucked the pamphlet into her mostly-empty handbag and watched two tourist children rub the nose of the bronze bull. And realized that Chalky was watching her.

“You’re new,” he said. “What’s your name?” And after a pause in which she did not respond, “Do you find that the Host suits you?” 

“Very much,” she said, firmly, and keeping her gaze averted. “I daresay you would say the same about your side.” 

“And British,” Chalky mused. “Well, I’ll see you around, perhaps.” He nodded cordially and wandered off up the street.

Milicent took a moment to be able to move her legs and return back the way she had come. So that was the possible leader of the Opposition, she thought. The one who held Mitch McConnell’s tender parts in a vise, according to one school of thought, or had simply corrupted the man, according to another. According to Milicent, actions were more important than motives. 

And now she had twice as many reports to make about this excursion. At least she’d been clear from the start that she was not going to be playing any Cold War games. No double agent nonsense and no violence. Just analysis and the occasional excursion to observe events in the real world. Which she had applied for permission to do, she reminded herself, so there was no point in whingeing about accidentally running into a major player. 

Accidentally. Of course. That was likely.

Milicent Bagot, late of Her Majesty’s Military Intelligence Section Five, snorted quietly and walked on.

**Author's Note:**

> Milicent Bagot (1907-2006) worked for British Military Intelligence from 1931 to 1967, rising from mere taking-dictation-secretary to Assistant Secretary as an expert in Soviet Communism during the Cold War. When I decided to add an ex-intelligence officer to this story, she was the obvious pick. She ought to have a bigger fandom than just me!


End file.
